Project details

Kinfolk is a place-based augmented reality app that reimagines how we remember, teach and experience history in public space. In a time of book bans, cultural erasure, and monuments that still glorify oppression, Kinfolk offers a different kind of education rooted in truth and powered by community.

The app allows users to place digital monuments in the real world, revealing stories of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Queer communities that are too often left out of official narratives. Through AR monuments, guided quests, badge challenges and a growing community archive, Kinfolk turns sidewalks, parks, classrooms, and city squares into living portals of memory and imagination.

As a freelance software engineer and game designer on the Kinfolk app, I contributed to a major product refresh focused on rethinking the user journey, modernizing the interface, and introducing new narrative gameplay systems that help people not just read history, but walk through it.

Download the Kinfolk app on iOS and Android.

Key Features

Place-Based AR Monuments: Explore digital monuments anchored in real locations, created in collaboration with community artists, historians, and local residents.
Monuments Library: Browse a curated library of stories by category, theme or location whether you’re onsite at a monument or exploring from home.
Guided Quests & Badge Challenges: Go on narrative walking tours that blend AR, audio, text and interaction. Earn badges and achievements as you move through space and story.
Community Archive: Contribute oral histories, family archives, photos, music and reflections to a living digital archive that preserves community memory.
Host & Co-Create Monuments: Schools, museums and organizations can partner with Kinfolk to bring monuments to their own neighborhoods and learning environments.

My Role & Responsibilities
I joined the team as a freelance software engineer and game designer during a major update cycle and focused on redesigning and extending the core mobile experience. My key contributions included:

UI/UX Redesign: Reworked large portions of the app’s interface and interaction flow, replacing older UI with a cleaner, more intuitive layout that better supports monuments, quests and archives.
Guided Quests & Badge System: Designed and implemented the new location based Guided Quests and Badge Challenges feature set, from architecture to in-app integration so that teams could create modular, reusable quest flows and reward structures.
Modular Architecture: Structured the quest and progression systems in a highly modular way, making it easier to extend content, add new quest types, and tweak player flows without rewriting core systems.
UI Animation & Transitions: Implemented polished UI animations and transitions throughout the new flows, emphasizing clarity and responsiveness while keeping performance in mind on a wide range of devices.
AR Bug Fixes & Stability: Investigated and resolved several AR-related issues to improve stability and user experience during monument placement and exploration.
Builds & Testing: Prepared and tested mobile builds across platforms, supporting the team with QA, iteration and deployment during an active production timeline.

Tech Stack
Engine: Unity

Team Size
Programmers: 5
QA Analysts: 2

Timeline
2020 - Ongoing development & feature updates